As an affiliate marketer, the phrase "Content is King" is probably familiar to you. You understand that populating your website with articles, reports and other useful information is essential. Visitors to your website want advice, tips, data, how-to information and more. If you do not provide useful information, your visitors will not use your site.

The temptation in affiliate marketing is to load a site with content haphazardly. Often, marketers want to get content on quickly, and the more the better. They know the search engines love content.

Many internet marketers have multiple websites. Some populate these various websites with the same content, just for the sake of having content. The major search engines discourage this kind of content stuffing.

Think of things from the search engine's point of view. They have users who trust them to provide quality search results. It looks bad on them if they provide numerous search results that link to the same kind of content.

Think of things from your point of view. You may search the term
"Premium Snowboards" and pages of search results come up. You then click on a myriad of these. Each link brings you to web pages that have the same articles or reports on premium snowboards.

Very quickly, your surfing becomes redundant. There is no new and fresh information for you to access. Everyone is duplicating everyone else's content in exactly the same way, while trying to make it appear as his or her own creation. This is a poor way to handle content on a website.

What is duplicate content? Typically, duplicate content is major blocks of content on or across domains. This is content that either completely matches other content or is extremely similar.

Marketers sometimes duplicate content across multiple domains to manipulate search engine rankings. They want the keywords in this duplicate content to trigger a high ranking in search engine results.

Some times internet marketers seek to gain more traffic through popular or long-tail queries. They use duplicate content across several websites to achieve this end. Again, the major search engines frown on this manipulative behavior.

As an affiliate marketer, you want to operate according to the rules. Why receive a slap from a major search engine for wrongly using duplicate content. In the end, your business suffers, as your efforts were a waste of time.

The search engines penalize you by not recognizing your site. You therefore gain the opposite result, no top search engine rankings. This also hurts your page rank, which may become non-existent.

In addition, think of your reputation as an affiliate marketer. You promote products on your website and blog. You may have several websites and blogs. People who visit these portals want timely and relevant information on topics related to your products. They also want quality product reviews, fresh and up-to-date.

Protect your reputation as a knowledgeable and credible affiliate marketer by giving your audience this information. You can do this in many ways. This includes using other peoples content, but using it the right way. Here are a few tips concerning using content wisely:

Write Your Own Fresh Content

You cannot get any fresher content than creating your own well-researched 100 percent original articles. Write articles that talk about your experiences with your affiliate products.

Interview others and write an article or report based on their testimonials. Engage in article writing on topics related to the products you sell. This "extra" information on related topics provides additional insight into the products you market. Customers appreciate this.

Rewrite Affiliate or Private Label Rights Materials

You can take existing information and put it into your own words. In this way, your site does not have the same look and sound as other affiliate websites. This makes your website unique. You are still offering excellent information, but in your own voice.

Properly Acknowledge Content from Others

Adhere to copyright rules. When using the content of others, include a resource box that links back to their website. Present the content exactly as the owner of it specified. Do not pass off the work as your own. Give the name of the author as well.

You can format the content to match the look of your site. You can use deep linking, bolding and other formatting. This makes the content unique to your site while still maintaining the terms of use of the original author.

More information on the duplicate content debate is available through a good article marketing service. EBooks are available that explains the issue fully. A good article distribution service offers these EBooks free as a service to affiliate marketers and authors. Take advantage of what they offer to ensure you understand the use of duplicate content fully.